u/jexo10

Watching an old movie on a modern tv can look strangely smooth, almost like someone filmed it recently on a cheap digital camera.

A lot of TVs have motion interpolation, where they generate extra frames between the real ones. It can make movement look smoother, but it can also give films that weird soap opera look.

The funny thing is you buy a nice tv to watch a movie and then have to dig through five menus to make it stop inventing frames the director never filmed

Seven-segment displays have been around forever and somehow they're still everywhere.

Microwaves, alarm clocks, ovens, cheap meters, old industrial equipment. If something only needs to show a number, there's still not much reason to replace those little red or green bars with anything fancier.

They're ugly, incredibly basic and almost impossible to misunderstand.

Probably one of the best examples of technology that just refused to become obsolete.

There are random indie websites that exist solely because someone got tired of doing one specific calculation themselves and wanted to automate it for himself and others for free.

Need to convert really insanely specific calculation? There's a website for it someone made in his breaktime. Want to calculate the exact number of days between two dates? we have multiple sites far that. Figure out how balls to fill a ball pit? Yep, we have a site for that to, because why not.

Most of them look like they were built in 2009 and haven't been touched since, but they work perfectly.

The internet is still full of these tiny little tools made by one person who apparently thought someone might need this and just put it online.

I always think about how weird debugging must be on something that doesn't even have a screen.

No terminal. No error message. Sometimes not even an operating system. Just a board that's doing absolutely nothing and you're trying to figure out why.

Engineers end up using things like JTAG, oscilloscopes, logic analyzers and test points to basically interrogate the hardware directly.

Imagine debugging a computer where the computer can't tell you what's wrong.

The interesting thing about Thread is that it's trying to make smart home devices work more like a little neighborhood than a bunch of gadgets all shouting at your router.

A device can pass information along to another device, which can pass it along again. Most of the hardware doesn't need huge amounts of power or bandwidth either.

You probably won't notice Thread when it works. Which is probably the point

Touchscreens existed in the 70s. e-ink displays were developed in the 60s. voice recognition has been worked on since the 50s. neural networks are from the 40s

none of them became products until the hardware caught up to the idea. the concept was never the problem, the manufacturing cost and processing power were

most things that feel new are just old ideas that finally got cheap enough

Turning it off and on again at every level. laptop, enterprise server, doesn't matter. nobody has a complete explanation for why it works in most cases, just something about software accumulating errors in state over time

we've shipped decades of software that slowly breaks itself and the agreed solution is just restart it occasionally. everyone accepted this and moved on

And also my second one is that jpeg throws away image data permanently and somehow the result looks fine most of the time. that one still bothers me

Tried a wireless guitar setup once and the sound itself was completely fine. Couldn't hear anything obviously wrong with the sound or the guitar.

But playing it felt just a little weird. Just slightly behind what my hands were doing. it felt really laggy sometimes

It's one of those things you don't really notice until you go back to a cabled guitar. A few milliseconds apparently matters a lot when your brain expects the sound at basically the same time when you hands stuck the cords.

Github goes down and pull requests stop across thousands of companies. aws has an outage and startups that built everything on it just wait. openai has an api issue and products that replaced their own features with it stop working

the efficiency argument for using these things is real. So the problem is that you have handed your uptime to someone else's incident response team

companies just pick efficiency and hope that system don't do down for a longer period of time

I've seen a lot of systems survive bad hardware, power cuts and random bugs.

Then someone forgets to renew a subscription and the whole thing stops working.

Or the only person who knows how it works goes on holiday, and someone else mess up the system.

Sometimes the most important part of a system is just "remember to do this thing every six months", which is probably the least reliable piece of technology we have

It's weird thinking about how much stuff we use where there isn't really an operating system underneath it.

You write code that talks directly to the hardware, deals with the memory, timers, inputs, everything yourself. No Windows or Linux sitting there taking care of things for you.

Makes a normal desktop suddenly seem ridiculously complicated. We have an entire operating system just so we can open a calculator.